GlotPress

I little bit taken over the whole project. It doesn’t say much since I’m basically work alone on it and most of the time I’m talking to myself on Trac. What is prettu sayd but that said it’s cool to work on something that is quite meaningful since translate.wordpress.org is running on it. Till now I only did some minor fixes and helped out the mobile theme for fixing the export format for Windows Phone.

Paul Gibbs also helped out for helping out on the API side. You now can send Last-Modified/If?-Modified-Since header so you don’t download to much. He is planning to use it in BuddyPress. Who knows WordPress language packages are going to use it some day too.

For this year hopefully I can close most of the tickets on 1.0 milestone. At this moment there are 39 active tickets. Hopefully that also means that GlotPress.org gets a real site instead of a redirection to blog.GlotPress.org. Also it would be awesome to have a few regular contributors.

Bash scripts

After Nikolay Bachiyski showed me some bash script I was thinking about how I can use them on my own GlotPress installation where also Pods Framework is running on. So I wrote almost the same bash script to update the translations. It downloads the Git repository, generate a POT file with makepot.php and loads the file with the CLI script from GlotPress.

After doing this I was thinking how I could use a bash script to download translations from GlotPress. I created a script that downloads the Windows Prone repository and then selective select the GlotPress projects and downloads them to the right location inside the repository. After this it’s getting committed. The code now can be found inside on the WordPress Mobile GitHub account.

wp-i18n-tools

So WordPress has a tool to create things like POT files but to use it correctly for Pods Framework I needed to do some adjustments. Also this one can be found on my GitHub account. I did some minor fixes as be able to set the slug of the main file for a plugin since Pods framework using init.php and not pods.php.

After I wrote the bash script and did the first import I found out that there where a lot of extra strings added. After checking I saw it did also add strings without a domain. After reading the code I did just a minor check on the domain for plugins. So when the domain is empty it will skip that string. After a fresh run

When I graduated in July 2010 I first wanted to do some experience at a company. I did my internship at theFactor.e and it made sense to also start working there. It was an awesome time and it’s a great company to work at. In my job as iOS developer I just struggled to much with being a fulltime and only iOS developer. And after almost 5 months I stopped working there. It wasn’t time trowed away since I did learned a lot there with the help of the Android developer. Not knowing how treading works and need to learn that in a week was one of the most interesting things I ever did. So if you ever see a nice vacancy you like, I would say go for it.

After that I decided that going to work at an university was making sense but it never get to that. I asked someone for a parttime job and that became in a month my next fulltime job. I start working at mobtzu (the valley)  and that was one of the worst decisions I ever made. I worked with a few awesome people like the design lead but all the promises they made where never fulfilled. I was hoping to learn there more about user experience and interaction design but never got a real change for doing that. So I quite my job again and end of June 2011 was my last day. After that I still did freelance work for them but on my terms except when they pay. That was always a surprise.

But after WordCamp Norway 2012 they sued me after a presentation I did there. I just mentioned a project and that was all I did. Obviously when I signed my contract I read it all and I had question about one of the terms. They explained me differently when I signed it. In the end they said I only could say I worked there. They also lied about that the end client wasn’t happy about it. A few months ago I saw him and asked him about it. He didn’t knew anything about it. So yes I would always run away from this type of companies.

The present

After this all it made me a better person and be more respectful to the people I worked with. And if I ever be a boss to someone I would never be that disrespectful as mobtzu was to me. I would more do it like theFactor.e but obviously in my own way. The thing I never understood why every specialiasme had it’s own space/island (can be changed now). It doesn’t have to be a bad thing but me as a person like to be involved more then my own one. I want to learn from other people. It doesn’t mean I will ever be a designer but for example some tricks they know are good to know yourself. Obviously this are things you can solve on multiple ways.

So when I ever lead an company I will always respect freelancers and what they do. They should be equal to your own employees. So no payment two months later but on the way like you would expect it to be done to you. So on time or even within a few days when you got the invoice.

Work is just a part of our lives and it’s a requirement but it doesn’t mean we need to be stealing from each others. Be nice and help each other to make the best of their lives.

One part of the reason why I say this is because I was planning to organize it in the end of 2011 and I even wrote a blog post about it. I even had a few plans on how to do this and possible cities where it make sense to organize it. But someone told me that WordCamp Central was planning this. When WordCamp Europe was announced I did some research and founded out that there never was a real plan for this but to me the plan sounded pretty stable and what I heard sounded good. Because of that I put my progress on hold and I already worked out quite a bit. I was waiting for the announcement till I heard different at WordCamp Lisbon.

Another thing is that they don’t want people to join the team. I tried once and they said yes but when there was a meeting they didn’t asked me to join. The same counts when it was discussed at the WordPress community summit. I wasn’t asked again to join the conversation and there where more European people that should have been asked to join the discussion.

The thing what also irritated there was that people where talking about it. Like that it would be in The Netherlands and someone could help out there. I was sitting there and thinking by myself like what about me. I also live there. It was very disrespectful against me and I do believe that I didn’t deserved that. I guess in Europe we got several WordPress groups. And I’m happy to be in the honest group that loves to share and help out.

This all doesn’t mean I will not be there. I love the people who will be around and I’m happy that a lot of people will fly over from the states. This is just something what I wanted to say for a long period and wasn’t able to find the correct words. It is not my intention to attack people with this but I’m not going to be silent about my opinion and also I want to open the discussion about it since that has never taken place.

It is a shame that my Serbian is not that good yet and that I didn’t understand most of what Vladimir Prelovac and Sinisa Komlenic told. Luckily I recorded both sessions so I can watch it back when I know more Serbian.

As far as I understand all people would love to see another one and we also told them the idea of having a WordCamp Serbia. I told everyone the rules behind organizing a WordCamp and why it wasn’t approved the first time. Hopefully we can start organizing a WordCamp soon when I have the change to talk with WordCamp central.

Also I’m really curious who will speak next time. There were lots of talented people yesterday and I can’t wait to hear them speak and then also understand them.

One of the reasons why I want to do this is that I can just blog about something that is on my mind without the need to go to deep in it. A short blog about something really awesome or something what needs attention. Also my hope is that it will lead to more reaction then people reading a long post and are clueless what they really read.

Obviously I first need to fix my blog a bit since I broke it when I accidentally overwrite some files. The design of that isn’t how I want it to be. Obviously I should use GIT and that is something I do use now. I only need to move all the code to live yet but first I need to test things out to have a WordPress network installation in a subfolder. Some things doesn’t work nicely yet like linking to /wp-admin/network/ (ticket 23221).

Guidelines?

The first thing I noticed when I was applying to organize WordCamp Serbia is that the rules aren’t that clear at all. They are spread over several pages what you really signed up for. I guess a page what summarize the (most) important rules is probably a good thing to do.

What are the rules for getting approved

The process is described here: http://plan.wordcamp.org/become-an-organizer/application-process/. But there aren’t described what it is based on. I got denied for WordCamp Serbia because we first need to grow a community but what about The Netherlands when they first organized the WordCamp. Till the end of 2012 we didn’t had continues meetups. That doesn’t mean the WordCamp will not be visited. And what about that WordCamp Croatia got approved. I have no clue who they are but I do know they don’t respond on e-mail. In Serbia I had 4 people willing to help out in a week. So the point what I want to make here is that the guidelines for this aren’t consistent.

Promoting someone

One of weird things in the rules is that you can’t promote someone that doesn’t respect the WordPress license or trademark. It’s already hard to ensure that for your team, speakers, sponsors and volunteers. Even harder maybe impossible when you promote someone. Especially the last line about 10 grade math is sad. We building a community with each other. Do we really need to hire a detective for every person we going to work with. That just retarded. You can find the text here: http://plan.wordcamp.org/become-an-organizer/representing-wordpress/.

Helping out with a WordCamp

What I see is that WordCamps are mostly organized by the same people. It’s seems it’s quite hard to get in that group. Obviously this doesn’t count for every WordCamp. But organizing a WordCamp is a honor and the people should be elected if needed. I know by fact that some WordCamps should not have been given by the people who did it. Also the thing that is missing for this is giving feedback to the WordCamp Central. I think it would be good that after every WordCamp, Central would mail all the participants a mail about their opinion. If I’m correct I only got 2 mails from WordCamps about my opinion and I already visited ten WordCamps.

Promoting your business

An important rule that should be added if it’s not already there is that organizers/volunteers shouldn’t promote their business at WordCamps. Thats the wrong move to make. It’s you as a person that organize the WordCamp and not your business. Even if you are a freelancer. Probably this rule should also apply to speakers. I already saw some sessions where speakers where promoting their book or services. That’s just wrong. Thats not why you speak. You love WordPress and what you can do with it.

Conclusion

Yes, I don’t agree with all the rules. That doesn’t mean I don’t like WordCamps. I like them a lot. But I do see issues with the current guidelines. And since WordCamps are growing we should restrict it more and maybe even force that every new edition of  a WordCamp should have at least one new person in the team. I would love to be a part of the conversation but till now the conversation is only between organizers and for possible new organizers.

I’m working together with Vinicius Massuchetto on some of the code at https://github.com/markoheijnen/glotpress-plugin. Also other people have access to change code for it. So hopefully the group will be bigger and we can see how everything goes. If you would love to work on it please get in contact with me and lets talk.

Possibilities

The advantages of GlotPress being a plugin are huge. An easy updateable plugin that has a default theme included. People can then also create childthemes for it and change it for their needs. Also plugins can be put on WordPress.org. Hopefully this all will people going to use GlotPress what result in more people contributing to GlotPress. What is currently an issue.

My ideas are to build a GitHub. So when I commit a change to GitHub with a translatable string, that is also is going to be included in GlotPress. This would make my workflow so much easier. And I can then share it on WordPress.org so other people can use it too.

Meetup London

First time I visited a meetup outside The Netherlands so l had lots of expectations of it. Also because the meetup in London is a big one. The first talk from Laura Kalbag was quite interesting. It was about designing icons for WordPress. It’s not something I would do but I will for sure play with it. People sometimes forget how important it is.

The second presentation was from John Graham-Cummingabout Cloudflare. It’s quite an interesting service what can speed up your website since they will serve your pages. It’s not something I would probably use. I’m that guy that loves to have full control over the website. Still it can be really handy for people with bad hosting or get a lot of Ddos attacks.

Pre meetup Belgrade

In Belgrade I had a little meetup for planning a big WordPress meetup in Belgrade. The date is been set and the program is pretty much defined. I already am really enthusiast about it and would love to announce what we have in mind and that people can register for it. I hope we get a lot of positive feedback and we can use that to organize a WordCamp Serbia for this year. Hopefully soon there will be a real WordPress community in Serbia.

Meetup Enschede

Last Thursday the first meetup in Enschede had taken place. Around 50 people visited the meetup and for a first one that is an amazing thing. They let me give a talk and I presented the new media flow in WordPress and the cool stuff you can do with that. I showed an example how a new flow can be for editing an image. It included image filters so you can then create your own Instagram. People asked all kinds of questions like if WordPress improved smashing images. In the end there was a question round where people could ask all kinds of questions. Most of them I also responded on since there where quite a few technical questions. Overall a great evening and can’t wait till next time.

WordCamp Norway

This year I got an email if I wanted to speak in Norway and after last year my answer was obviously a full yes. Since I traveled last year to a lot of WordCamps and also knew a lot of people from last year I had an really awesome weekend. I even learned some weird stuff in JavaScript that I most likely never found out.

The presentation I gave here was almost the same as at the meetup in Enschede but with a small changes and an extra example in it. I hope the people here where also really inspired with my Instagram example. After the presentation there weren’t a lot of questions but due the day people ask me question about what you can do with WP_Image_Editor and mentioned certain use cases. I think in the next months we are going to see some really cool plugins that are using it like WPThumb.

Hackday WordCamo Norway

This was quite a interesting day. In the beginning I didn’t do much except putting my presentation online and talk with people about some issues they have. Later the day a charity hackathon started and I was working on a charity website. The only thing I really did was updating a plugin because it was using the newest jQuery version. I also tried to fix the calendar locally but that plugin was really weird with theming. I only managed once to get it working properly but then I founded out that there was a new update out for it. After the upgrade everything was broken again and till now I didn’t manage to get it working. Hopefully I get the pro version soon so I maybe can check it out if I get that one to work how it should.

Conclusion

If you like traveling you can go to really awesome meetups/WordCamps in Europe. I enjoyed every minute and can’t wait for the next WordPress related event. Also I would love to speak more this year and improve my presenting skills. I always love to show people things that I hack together in WordPress like my plugin Tabify edit screen and my WordPress as Instagram example.

The past

Well, first dealing with personal, what to say about this. I do know the start was interesting. I got sued by my old boss because of my talk at WordCamp Norway. I didn’t do anything wrong except that I even once worked at a fucked up company like that. But yeah lesson learned and from now on I always work with great people or I’m running away.

I also learned a lot of the thing I do and love. Traveled a lot to WordCamps, conferences and places I loved to explorer. I even wat able to speak at 4 WordCamps and 1 meetup and improving every time I present.

Also start sporting a bit again. Played some tennis tournaments where I always lost the first round but still I see improvements every time and for now that counts.

The future

This year I have great plans. Going to move to Amsterdam. I said that already a few times but this time I mean it and this is my first and most important priority for this year. By doing this I also going to put more energy in having an own real company. With this I mean that I want to have clients directly instead through an agency. I already have some great plans and already talking with the people I want to work with. So hopefully this month there will be a blog post about what this is.

I also would love to play handball again. It’s the sport I love and hopefully be able to play again. Soon I will train again to get my condition back on how it was several years ago. I also thinking to get a private trainer to improve my tennis game. It’s a game I like but need to learn the basic before my next tournament.

Also I would love to see most of my friends from my exchange I had in 2009 to Austria. For the rest I don’t have plans. I see how it goes and I’m sure this year is going to be great one.

WordPress

The past

Previous year was a blast. I really started contributing back to WordPress with version 3.4 on the XML-RPC. I did some minor things in 3.0 en 3.3 but not feature based. In 3.4 it was a nice start where I was working in a team with Max Cutler and Peter Westwood. With this work the XML-RPC is more useful right now and the mobile apps can do a little bit more then they use too. Also because of they great work of the mobile team. As a reward of my hard work I even was a recent rockstar for 3.4.

With 3.5 I worked on abstracting the image manipulation code. So we now don’t need to use GD but can use Gmagick, Imagick or some other library to make images smaller. What is a great feature to WordPress and a important step for photographers. This with the new nedia flow where the bigest code changes to WordPress 3.5. I learned a lot with it on how to design API’s and how to make it backwards compatible. It did caused two bugs where one is pretty serious. I created the bug even tho when I didn’t looked at the code I know it was wrong. Let’s see that as personal growth .

The future

I see myself as a contributing developers of WordPress. So for the next couple of releases I still will help with developing certain features. I would love to play with the new media flow and how to hook into that. I wanted to in 3.5 but the code was changing a lot and I don’t play that often with javascript so it would have been hard for me.

That said there are still some issues for me to address. In the last couple of months I had some opinion difference and I also hate that some things are discussing privately some things are just wrong. Hopefully I can help out to resolve those issues to create a better WordPress community.

Another thing is that I want to improve and professionalize the WordPress community in The Netherlands. At this moment there is a cool group of people hanging around at WordPress related events but there isn’t something continues. I’m now going to organize a meetup every two months but that will be it. Even WordCamp NL isn’t stable enough. It now seems like the end of this year what will cause to have a WordCamp NL every 18 months. Hopefully al this things will have a solid plan this year because that is something we need. We need to have a open community where someone can step up and help out.

WordCamps

The past

This year was a blast with WordCamps. I was at WordCamp Oslo, Netherlands, New York, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Lisbon and Toronto developers. Also I was invited to go to the Community summit in Tybee. I also spoken at Oslo, Netherlands, New York City and Toronto. So lots of cool stuff I learned there and most of the places where new to me.

The future

For now I will go to WordCamp Norway this month after that the plan is to visit only WordCamps in Europe and hopefully I can speak to some of them. One of the reason is that I would love to see how the WordPress communities are in Europe and be more involved in that.

I’m also planning to organize WordCamp Serbia. For now they denied it what is obviously a wrong decision. So I’m now planning a meetup and still planing the WordCamp. From the feedback I get from people inside and outside Serbia they really like the idea. Already have a lot of people wanting to help out. Even more then some WordCamps I went too. So that is a good sign and I’m pretty sure that the first WordCamp Serbia will be this year.

Blogging

No special headings needed here. Never really blogged so never really used WordPress. This year will and need to be different. I do a lot of cool stuff with WordPress and I believe that is worth blogging. So I’m now finding the right format, platform and people to do so. I do believe the idea I have is awesome and I do believe you people also thing that. So the next of couple of weeks I’m working on the idea/site and hopefully I’m be able to release it in the end of this month.

Not to big

It was something Matt Mullenweg said about my disappointment that WordCamp San Francisco this year was only one day instead of the three last year. I don’t recall the exact words but it was in the line that if you want to have a great WordCamp it isn’t about duration and I agree with that. WordCamp Oslo was a great experience and that was only one day and even WordCamp San Francisco was really awesome. A part of that was that this time I could visit the hack day.

The Venue

Probably the most expensive item on the budget list but without a great venue there isn’t a great experience. Obviously you need a great space for the sessions but it’s even important for people to talk with each other. To all the WordCamps I visited, none of them I went to all the sessions I could watch. There are time slots that there aren’t sessions a person is interested in or you just want to have a nice talk with someone.

Speakers

Everyone should be able to send in a proposal. Ask people if they have ideas for a proposal. Not only the familiar faces but also try to reach out to the unknown faces of the local community. There are quite a lot of people with great skills the community doesn’t know.

This year WordCamp San Francisco did the invitation them self. There wasn’t a way to send in a proposal. The talks where pretty good but I have the feeling this does make the talks little bit less surprising. However I still saw some sessions where I didn’t knew the speaker so that is still a good thing.

Tracks

Also the amount of tracks should not be more then three maybe even four. If it’s more then that it’s starts getting confusing. It’s then better to be selective in which sessions you want to have in. Or if you have only one day, think about a second day. The important factor is that the sessions that will be given are just awesome. Also don’t try to have a speaker speak more then twice. It somehow makes the WordCamp feel less good. Also it’s good to give some of the new guys in the local community a change to speak. Try to find those people.

Organize a panel session

I was at multiple WordCamps that had a panel session and at WordCamp Toronto (Developers) I was even part of it. It was a great experience in both ways. You can have a great discussing with the audience about WordPress itself but also about having a WordPress business. The most important about this is to have the discussing with the audience and give them the change to talk instead of listening since that is something they do already the rest of the day.

It started on the hack day at WordCamp San Francisco where I worked mostly with Mike and Japh on it and talked with other people for getting feedback on how to do this. After the hack day I worked most of the time with Mike on getting things done and getting great feedback from Scribu and Nacin. When most of it was done Kurt helped us out with unit testing all of the code and had some great feedback as well.

The reason

The reason of the change was to allow ImageMagick to be used since it gives better images. The upside of this all is that the code is easier to read and less integrated in core so it is really easy to use inside plugins. There were also some small bugfixes to the existing code.

The most awesome part of this is that you now can write your own implementation of image handling. If you really love WPThumb then with some work I’m pretty sure you can also use that as a implementation in WordPress.

Code Examples

Cropping

This is like the basic resize/crop example how WordPress deals with it. This will create a 100×100 image that is cropped and got saved as /path/to/image-100×100.png

$file = '/path/to/image.png';

$editor = WP_Image_Editor::get_instance( $file );
$editor->resize( 100, 100, true );
$new_image_info = $editor->save();

Change of Mime-type

You can also save it as another mime-type by doing the following ways of saving. The first one is setting the filename and it will look up the mime type from the extension. The second one you don’t need to know the filename and you just set the mime type.

$file = '/path/to/image.png';

$editor = WP_Image_Editor::get_instance( $file );
$editor->resize( 100, 100, true );
$new_image_info = $editor->save( '/path/to/image.jpg' );
// or
$new_image_info = $editor->save( null, 'image/jpeg' );

Things that need to be done

There are still a lot of things to clean out before 3.5 is going to be released. Since plugin developers can create their own implementation we still need to look how we can add stuff later without breaking their implementation.

Japh is also working on getting ImageMagick/convert working. This is doing all this things by using the commandline instead of using the Imagick PHP library. I’m really curious to see how that goes.

Current implementation

The current implementation is a Debian (testing) distribution with nginx 1.3.5 as server with SPDY installed. I don’t yet need SPDY but I do have some plans coming where secure connection is needed. Also I installed APC

Caching

Since I switch to nginx I stopped using W3 Total Cache. It’s a really powerful plugin but I want something that I can control with hooks instead of a settings. Also a lot of option can’t really be used when running nginx. Browser cache is something nginx already take care off.

For object caching I use for APC Object Cache Backend from Mark Jaquith.

At this moment I only minify the HTML with a custom script what is mostly borrowed from WP-HTML-Compression with some tweaks. I’m now looking into how other plugins minify their Javascript/CSS and will build my own one and borrow some of their code. What I want to do is only minify CSS/Javascript when a plugin got activated/deactivated or a theme got switched. Not sure what the best way is to implement this but it doesn’t make sense to regenerate CSS/Javascript when there is not change at all.

Another thing is the CDN. I don’t really need to store my files on another server. I do however want to have a cookieless domain. So I rewrite all the needed urls to another domain what still get the images from my server.

Last thing is page caching. This is something I’m unsure about. I will look into WP Super Cache and Batcache. It’s most likely I will end up with file caching since my host has SSD caching so reading those files will hopefully be really fast. Who knows I try to combine something together so switching over to Batcache is possible then.

Plugins

For almost everything my site will use I will write the code myself. A lot of plugins do stuff I don’t need or break when you minify the CSS/Javascript. In the other situations I will modify their code and put it on github as a reference to the changes I made.